Warner Bros. / Youtube Continued...+ Hare Ribbin, McKimson/Clampett

This is a great McKimson scene showing how versatile Bugs is. Not only can he convincingly portray himself, he can also impersonate a French chef. So funny that Bob Clampett would inspire such great animation and then take it so lightly that he would put it under water where you see it all wiggly.

Lots more subtlety, punctuated by a few extreme expressions that only happen in Clampett's cartoons.

38 comments:

Man... chock filled with great expressions and poses! Whenever I watch these old cartoons I feel like today's cartoon audience is being cheated. The chances of seeing a new cartoon with this much character on TV is zero.

will you do a post on the scene where bugs shoots the dog in the mouth?

That scene describes pretty well why I think Clampett was not Oscar material. There's just nothing very cuddly about his cartoons. It's like giving Cagney an Oscar for a ganster role. Wasn't gonna happen.

I'm trying to image what the story meetings must have been like: "Uh Bob, you do realise that Bugs and the dog are still underwater?, shouldn't we try and get them out of there?" "Why? are you worried they're gonna drown?"

Like a lot of Clampett's characters that go up against Bugs Bunny,the dog is based on a radio character. I can't remember his name, but he was The Mad Russian, and he had catchphrases like "Hello, what can I do to you?"and "I'm going to kill you a million times". Clampett drew a lot of inspiration from the radio, I'm not sure how this is any different from how Hanna and Barberra "borrowed" liberally from existing actors to create their cartoons in the '60s, I can only say that it's O.K. for Bob because he did it better.

WB cut out the last part when bugs gives the dog a gun and he kills himself (Grr!). I love the B.O. part too, and the part when the dog gets smitten over Bugs dressed as a mermaid. Mama, Baby, Dad! Whoo! Whoo! Whoo! LOL!

WB cut out the last part when bugs gives the dog a gun and he kills himself (Grr!).

Actually, back in the day WB (or I think it was Leon himself) told Clampett to change the first ending he had which was Bugs shoving the gun into the dog's mouth and pulling the trigger himself. So, he got BobMcKimson to quickly animate a scene which shows Bugs giving the gun to the dog so that he can shoot himself with it. The biggest problem with this was that this extra footage put Clampett behind schedule as well as over budget on this cartoon which is one of the factors that lead to his *"dismissal" soon afterwards.

*please note that dismissal is in quotation marks indicating that it is not a stone cold fact but rather speculation open to interpretation.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but from Clampett's own lips, Leon more or less sold him out, by getting him and everyone else to agree to sign new contracts when he was working out a deal to sell without telling anybody. When Clampett found out, he was a little sore, and was really anxious to be his own boss anyway. He was willing to stay for Leon, more or less. When he learned Leon was out, he wanted out, too.

I hope I didn't mangle that too much. It's my interpretation of the comments on the B&C dvd.

It's strange that in the original version, aside from Bugs shooting the dog and Clampett giving the audience no indication (added in the revised version)that the dog hasn't just bitten Bugs in half, they also shortened the underwater "tag" scene, along with the dog's original rabbit sniffing up to the armpit.

Neither of those scenes is controversal, so the only thing I can figure out is they cut them to lower the Technicolor print costs, in order to get the cartoon back on budget due to the two extra scenes that McKimson had to draw.

You're probably right,John. Warner's cartoons were budgeted down to the last frame(most of them were less than seven minutes long, the bare minimum that studios liked to put on a single reel of film)Leon didn't have any problem with cutting things out entirely, like the whole final gag from Tex Avery's "The Heckling Hare",but adding MORE frames to a scene in order to accomodate another gag,well, that probably required some rejiggering of the existing cartoon. A change like this would have also required a complete redo of the soundtrack, unless it had already gone under the camera, which would have caused an even bigger problem because Warners cartoons generally went from work print to final print without any editing. The person shooting the artwork would have to start at frame one with all the completed cels and backgrounds and shoot the whole thing without any edits (as far as I know, WB was the only one that worked this way) That's also the reason why you see so many simple, normally correctable errors on some cartoons. If there was a dropped cel or a vanishing element like Bug's missing bandana in "Buckaroo Bugs", it just had to go out the way it was. So you can see, this little change that Leon demanded could have been a really huge deal at the time.

Commenting on the scene: this mock restaraunt bit is probably one of the best peices of animation acting ever commited to film. Bugs goes through a whole range of emotions as the french waiter, has an argument with an imaginary kitchen worker, vows to his customer that he will catch a rabbit himself,and then tiptoes back into into the shot doing an Elmer Fudd impression, and even after all that, it still takes the dog a few beats to realise he's been conned. No other director could have timed this scene better.

I find it interesting to look at where a character like bugs bunny came from to what they have made him now. In this show they even give everyone jet packs, except for the road runner character, he flies.

I was hoping John K might give us a blog on his thoughts about the transformation an iconic character like bugs has taken over the years.

i appreciate all the stuff you do for the animation community but do you think you can start posting you examples in the quicktime format? I'd love to frame through some of these examples fine animation technique.